


I'll Know My Name

by Skoll



Series: Author's Favorites [6]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Dark, Eventual Relationships, Hurt Jim, Hurt/Comfort, Kid James Kirk, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Tarsus IV, This stays bad for a long time before it gets any better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-06
Updated: 2011-08-06
Packaged: 2017-10-22 07:16:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Besides, Jim thinks, Tarsus IV won't be that important, really. It's only for a year, maybe two—Jim's twelve, not a baby, and he knows better than to think that a year or two can really change anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Know My Name

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This story deals with Tarsus IV, which means that it contains a great number of character deaths. I tried very hard to handle this as delicately as possible; this deals more with the psychological impact of the event on Jim than on gory physical details. Still, this story has a lot of potential triggers, and so I ask that everyone please read carefully.

Winona waits until the door's swung shut behind them to start in on him.

“Jesus, Jimmy,” she's saying, even as the lock's snicking shut. She spins, half-rounding on him, eyes angry, and then seems to force herself back, one hand coming up to tangle in her long hair, the other resting over her eyes. Jim takes a second to look at her while she does this. Maybe she's angry, and maybe she has a right to be, but she's been in space for months on end and Jim's twelve; he'll always take any excuse to relearn his mother's beautiful, care-creased face. Her hair was impeccable in the courtroom, as she faced down a judge and argued for her younger son. Now that they're home it's coming out of its band in wild strands of honey-gold that look, as Jim's been told, just like his own shorter hair—now she's facing him down and coming apart.

But she's moving before it turns into a confrontation, turning again and walking in that quick way of hers towards the kitchen. The argument continues over the sound of pans and pots clanging, of drawers being pulled open maybe a little harder than they need to be. “What the hell is going on with you?” she asks him, voice pitched loud to reach his ears over the din she's causing. She only curses when she means it, only when she's really angry. Jim thinks she doesn't realize that he hears the next, quieter, “Why did everything move—?”

“Because you were in space, Mom,” he calls back. Teachers wonder about him, about how he breaks the curve on all their tests and yet can't sit still, and he thinks this is the answer. Winona Kirk, human force of nature, never still—even in her own kitchen, miles away from the spaceship that takes her all across the universe, she can't stop moving. When she pokes her head out around the kitchen's doorframe, giving him that look that says he's answered the wrong question, he tries for petulance. “Nothing, Mom, Jesus Christ.”

“Language, Jimmy,” she says. She snaps the words, but makes up for it by leaving the kitchen again, doubtless leaving shelves wide open and dishes all in the wrong places. She steps back out into the hall, where he's been standing this whole time, like for just a second she's willing to orbit him instead of the other way around. “Baby,” Winona says, with the voice she used to use to soothe nightmares, “I can't do anything to help if you won't tell me what's wrong.”

He slouches against a wall and ignores the way it makes his back tense, like all his skin's pulling too tight. “Nothing,” he says again.

“You drove your father's car off a cliff!” Winona says, her voice raising again, her shoulders tight. Jim knows she isn't sure whether to hold him or scream at him—she never has been, not since they realized his baby blue eyes weren't going anywhere, that he was going to look out at the world from George Kirk's blue eyes for the rest of his life. He's a lot like his mother, too much like his mother, and then he looks too much like his father for anyone's comfort; Winona's never known whether cradling him close or letting lose a stream of invective he can match word for word is the answer with Jim, and that's okay. She's never hit him or anything, no matter how mad she gets, and she spends so much time away that the arguments whenever she comes back are almost fun. “That's not nothing, Jimmy, that's—that's a suicide wish or serious aggression issues or something, I don't even know.”

“Stepfather's car,” he clarifies, “and I don't have a death wish, Mom, I promise. I just couldn't—.”

Jim realizes he's about to tell her everything and makes himself stop. Winona, without the truth to go on, latches onto the next nearest thing, the best piece of ammunition Jim's given her. “Jimmy, Frank isn't trying to replace your father, but he is my husband, and you are living under his roof. You can't just do things that like, honey. You could've really gotten hurt.”

Under his roof. Jim twitches a little, but he and Sam have already sworn each other to secrecy. You live under my roof, boy. “I wasn't hurt,” Jim says, and it's the wrong thing to say, he knows it is, but it's better than nothing.

“You nearly plummet off a cliff, get arrested for stealing the car and driving it illegally, nearly get sentenced to serve a sentence in a center for juvenile delinquents, get me called back to Earth in the middle of an important mission, and then you tell me it's nothing?” Her shoulders slump; Winona's decided on disappointment, apparently. “This is Iowa. People don't just forget things like this. What about when you want to find work, Jimmy? You're smart, God knows you do well academically, but this is the sort of thing that can really, really hurt you later on. What on God's green earth were you thinking?”

He wasn't. That's all. He just...the car was right there and the keys were in the ignition, and it was all shined up and everything, and he didn't think. Just felt, wind in his hair, dodging that cop, going through motions and that was it. Until the last second he thought he was gonna go right over the cliff with it, chase that wind all the way down until the last adrenaline filled instant. Jim didn't want to die, and he doesn't want to die now, but there was something liberating about just letting go. He thought at the end, thought to spin the car around and jump; he remembered to think when it mattered, in the last possible moment. But while he was driving, shoulder blades burning and eyes bright, the only thing he was thinking was Frank is gonna feel this.

Jim shrugs and tells her half of an unrelated truth. “Sam ran away again.”

It hasn't been until this moment that Winona noticed that her older son was gone; she's a good mother but she's like Jim, always has been. Something about the two of them makes their worlds narrow just to each other whenever they're close enough, like some sort of strange magnetism that affects them no matter what, regardless of whether they're arguing with or laughing at each other. Jim loves his brother and Winona loves both her sons equally, but Jim has always accidentally come first, in both her anger and affections. “Damn it,” she says, as she realizes her house is too quiet, too empty. She sits right there in the hall, back to the wall opposite his, hands back in her hair. “So, what, he ran, and you decided to run even faster?” she asks from between her fingers.

Make sure Frank doesn't come after me, this time, Sam had said, but it wasn't that. Really it was for the expression on Sam's face as Jim went roaring past, sunroof already long ejected and wind whipping honey-blond hair. It was because Frank's much slower on foot and Jim loves his brother, but it was also for the half-step Sam automatically took after him, like, just for once, he would be the one chasing after Jim. Catch me. But Jim just shrugs again, and his mother stands and storms, wordless, back to the kitchen, taking out her anger on dirty plates and the platters that had the nerve to move from where she left them.

When Frank comes home two nights later, a firm grip on Sam's arm and Sam lagging behind him, Winona and Frank talk in long, quiet strains in the kitchen, late at night when they think the boys are sleeping. Sam snores loud enough for two while Jim waits quietly on the stairs, listening. There he hears for the first time about Tarsus IV, about his aunt Susanna and her husband Cole who settled there a few years ago. He hears words like farming and hard work and good for them both come out of Frank's mouth, and words like family and healthy environment and good for them to finally explore a little come out of his mother's.

Jim sits on that stair and fingers the edge of his shirt, feeling the too-tight skin on his back shift as he does, and wonders.

Ultimately, when Winona announces that he and Sam are to spend a year or two on a farming colony called Tarsus IV, a little out-of-the way planet where his and Sam's records won't make as much of a difference and they'll be around family, Jim keeps quiet and packs his bag. He and Sam exchange a glance at the last possible moment, as they get in the car which Winona's using to drive them to the shuttle, and both know that they have proof, evidence that would send Frank packing instead of them. But they don't say anything, because it's embarrassing and they swore.

Besides, Jim thinks, Tarsus IV won't be that important, really. It's only a year, maybe two—Jim's twelve, not a baby, and he knows better than to think that a year or two can really change anything.

…

Life on Tarsus IV is—well, it's life.

Susanna and Cole, the aunt and uncle Jim remembers just the slightest bit in the fuzzy way of early childhood memories, don't exactly greet Sam and he with open arms at first. Jim can see from the slight frown at the corners of Susanna's lips when she first sees them that she's been talking to Frank. His mother wouldn't have glossed over the situation, but if she'd done the telling, Aunt Susanna would look more warmly concerned than worried, he expects. Still, she leans down to hug them both close when they approach, arms gentle despite her expectations, and that's enough.

The farm Susanna and Cole own, he and Sam are told on the car ride there, works mostly in grains and vegetables, with a couple of animals thrown in for variety. He and Sam are going to work in the fields after school, or collect eggs from the chickens in the mornings, or speak nicely and set their minds to whatever tasks adults set them. Jim understands what they're really getting at. Susanna's heard from Winona about her “genius boys”, anyway, and thinks that if she never lets them go idle, maybe they won't find time to make trouble.

The thing is, she's right. The school Jim and his brother attend is a small one, with only average level academics if even that—this is a small, new colony, after all. Jim doesn't have to spend much time on his schoolwork at all, really; he breezes through tests and borrows the textbooks the older kids use from the library, soaking up knowledge because he can. Still, without something else to do, even that wouldn't be enough to keep Jim entertained, not for long.

Working in the fields, though, learning to care for plants and how to gauge what soil is best for what crops, and just tiring himself out with physical labor every day, that's enough to keep Jim busy. They're shipped off to Tarsus at the end of fall, and so Jim's there to see planted crops grow, and help with the harvest, and see the plants die off in summer's heat, only to be replaced and have the whole thing repeat again. It sounds a little crazy whenever he tries to explain it to his mother, over the long conversations they make time for every couple of weeks, when his mother's eclectic schedule lines up with his, but it comes down to this—Jim just likes being surrounded by life. Back home, where there were no neighbors nearby and everything was dirt roads and dust, Jim wasn't surrounded by people or plants or anything, and with that much empty space to work in it was no wonder his mind couldn't keep still. Here, on Tarsus, there are at least things growing everywhere, even if there aren't as many people as Jim would like. Aunt Susana tells Winona that Jim has a green thumb, a real gift for getting things to thrive, and his mother's beaming smile is completely worth the sulk Sam goes into when he overhears.

It helps, too, that Susanna and Cole take two lodgers, about three months in—an older woman and her husband. The husband doesn't interest Jim; he's just quiet and unfailingly polite, and while he ever so occasionally displays a sort of shy brilliance in conversation, it's clear the man isn't comfortable expressing that brilliance. Jim talks to him a while to see if he can pry it out somehow, but gets bored after a week or so of failure. Kimura-san, he decides, is a waste of time. Sam takes to him wildly, of course; the man is some sort of scientist, in something uninteresting like marine biology, and Sam follows the man around like a puppy begging for a treat. It's not Jim's fault that Sam wants to be a marine biologist that month, or that he has bad taste in company. It just gives Jim more time with the more interesting lodger.

Sato-san, the wife of the couple, is the one that fascinates Jim. She's a woman of average height and average features, but she carries herself like she really used to be beautiful below the wrinkles—honestly, Jim thinks something about her is compelling even now, like charisma replaced good looks at some point. Everybody looks at her when she talks and answers her respectfully, without even really meaning to. Jim's looked up her records of course. She's ex-Starfleet, served on one of the big starships, retired as a lieutenant commander, so there's leadership potential there, obviously, but Jim doesn't think it's enough to explain her. Even more interesting than that is what Jim finds in her records: linguacode. Hoshi Sato is one of the key creators of the universal translator, an invention which, while still not perfect, was key to early communications with any number of alien species. Sato-san is a mystery, and Jim finds himself tagging along after her in what little spare time he has, trying to understand her. Sam makes fun of him for it, of course, but Jim doesn't really think Sam has any room to talk.

Finally, maybe because Jim really is that charming, and maybe because Sato-san has been amused by his attention this whole time, she stops him one night after dinner, as he's clearing the table and listening to Susanna and Sam joke around in the kitchen, “Look, kid,” she says, in a voice with an accent that sounds like it comes from everywhere and nowhere, “do you want to learn or not?”

“Hell yes,” Jim answers, almost dropping a plate in his excitement, and from that day on every moment he's not spending at school or working on the farm, he spends trailing after Sato, learning languages and dialects rapidly enough to make his head spin. On weekend nights, he and Sato sit out on the porch after the sun sets, just talking, in whatever Sato has declared as the language of the day. Sato sips tea and listens to Jim discuss his dreams in broken Vulcan, his friends in faltering Romulan, his thoughts in the harsh, tongue-twisting sounds of Klingon. It takes a while, but, gradually, Sato sips her tea a little less and talks a little more, and Jim grows more and more confident.

Jim shoots up between twelve and thirteen. He gets tanner, taller, stronger in a way that has everything to do with hard work. Sam's still taller than Jim, as Sam loves to point out, but Jim's catching up.

Still, when he's talking to his mother in the early hours of the morning, a few months past thirteen, and Winona says, “Jesus, Jimmy, you've grown,” there's a catch in her voice that tells him she isn't talking about his height.

…

Tarsus at twelve is glorious and fun and pretty much everything life should be, in Jim's opinion. It's the best year of Jim's life. He tells Sato this, and she points out in amused French that he hasn't had so very many of them yet, being only thirteen, but that doesn't change the fact that Jim is sure this is about the best life gets.

Tarsus at twelve is perfect. Of course, this just makes it perfectly obvious to Jim when things start going wrong at thirteen.

He's worked in the fields with the adult farmhands and helpers for about a year now, long enough that they include him in most of their jokes and know just what to get him on holidays, and know they can trust him to do the work they ask of him. Some of them live in a dorm just off the main farm house, and some live in houses further into town, but they all come up to dinner at the house at least three times a week, and mostly they strike Jim as a sort of extended family. Jim's played with their kids and bickered with Sato in front of them, and occasionally pestered them with questions about the things their experiences have taught them. He knows them all now. So when they start getting unsettled, leaving Jim out of more and more of their conversations and losing some of the lightheartedness he's come to expect from most of them, Jim feels that's a decent excuse to worry himself.

He sneaks around a lot, for about a week or so, listening from hallways and keyholes. Sam calls him paranoid, of course, but he's Jim's brother; when Jim asks him not to tell the adults, he rolls his eyes and keeps quiet, because both of them remember a certain oath, and after that a little secret keeping is trivial. From what whispers he hears, Jim picks up on some sort of political unease and hears the word blight used for the first time. It isn't until Sato sits him down and impresses his own lack of subtlety upon him that Jim realizes that maybe the grown ups have known all along he was there, and just couldn't bare to tell him any other way. It is Sato who finally gives him freedom to ask the questions that he's been bothered by for weeks. She tells him about the governor of their colony, a man by the name of Kodos, and how two members of his cabinet have recently quit for reasons left unexplained. Sato can't put a name to why this is making everyone so uneasy, or at least not any she cares to tell Jim, but that's alright—they just sit and discuss it a while, bouncing ideas and knowledge off each other, with Sato curbing Jim's more ridiculous theories and ever so occasionally looking pensive over some of his more reasonable opinions. They even have the discussion in Federation Standard, Jim's own native language feeling foreign on his tongue when he spends so much of his time with Sato furiously attempting to perfect the languages she's taught him. The plain, clipped tone Sato uses in Standard, so much less elegant than the sweeping, lilting sound her voice takes in the softer French they transitioned from, somehow drills the seriousness of the situation into Jim's mind, even though the situation in general is still largely coincidences and bad feelings.

There is more concrete evidence than this, though, and that no one has to explain to Jim. He sees it everyday in the farm's fields as he works after school hours, and even though he's only thirteen the workers know he sees it too, if the dark looks they sometimes share with him are anything to go on. Jim was on Tarsus IV last year in time to see a bountiful harvest from start to finish, from the seeds being planted in the ground to the reaping of the swaying stalks of the crops at the end of the season, and he's learned a lot about plants during his time here. He's learned enough to know this is not how the harvest ought to go. Right from the beginning there's trouble—rain washing seeds away in unseasonal floods, and then a sort of struggling growth among the remaining crops that speaks of something in the soil leeching away what the plants need to grow. When Jim hears the word blight listening in on conversations, it's the first time he's heard the word but not the first he's thought of it. There is a fungus growing up alongside the plants, and it's killing all the crops and no one seems to have any idea of how to make it stop—there's never been an outbreak like this, and apparently the rain is to blame for the sudden growths, but that's as far as anyone gets towards an explanation, as far as Jim knows. The fact remains that the crops are dying, and they eat those crops, live on a good portion of them, with the rest going to market for money which goes towards vital expenses, and feeding a lot of the townspeople besides. The crops are dying and there isn't a damn thing Jim can do about it.

Around him and Sam, the adults act blasé, like nothing's wrong at all. Aunt Susanna has a talk with them when she realizes Jim is worried, and exciting Sam into nervousness; she tells them about the stores of food the colony's been saving for years just in case of something like this. If anything goes wrong, she tells them, Kodos will contact Starfleet and they'll have emergency rations in no time at all. Jim nods along and hugs her when the conversation is over, elbowing Sam into silence when the older boy notices the way her hands shake against Jim's back. Jim's thirteen, after all, not stupid. He's heard from the other farmer's kids, and he knows the harvest isn't only going poorly on their farm, that families all across Tarsus IV are probably having the same conversations. But it's important to Susanna to think that Jim is reassured, so he lets her think that and is careful afterward to only discuss his worries with Sam and Sato, who he can trust to keep quiet.

Tarsus IV at twelve is like a dream, and at thirteen that changes. Jim thinks that's only natural. Life isn't a dream, after all, and sometimes there's no choice but to wake up.

He doesn't realize until later that this isn't waking up at all. By then, though, Jim is thirteen and a half, and has more important things to think about than misconceptions he used to hold. He does think back on this, sometimes, and try to poetically title Tarsus IV at thirteen and a half his nightmare, just for the sake of continuity, but even in his head it doesn't stick.

There are no words Jim Kirk can ever find for what Tarsus IV becomes when he is thirteen and a half.

…

In the end, it comes down to an umbrella.

The day is the same as any other—grey, with a threat of yet more rain on the horizon, and with a damp chill in the air. Jim rolls out of his bed in the room he shares with Sam and hits the ground with a thunk. It startles him into full awareness before he's expecting that; on the bed across the room, Sam's sleep-heavy head lifts in surprise, his dirty blond hair a rumpled halo around his head and his eyes bleary. “Ow,” Jim says.

Sam puts his head back down on his pillow with a muffled snort and something that sounds like, “You're an idiot, Jimmy.” Sam knows better than to think they have time to sleep—life starts early on Tarsus. Usually Jim would drag his brother into consciousness by poking, prodding and generally annoying his brother to bits until he gives sleep up as a lost cause. This morning, he just stretches out on the floor and contemplates going back to sleep himself, the wooden floorboards shifting below his ears with the sound of the house waking up beneath their room. The cold wood doesn't make a very good pillow, though, and eventually Jim levers himself up and dresses in the near-dark of morning, leaving Sam to sleep.

He skips down stairs on the wooden staircase, his bare feet chilled, and walks quickly to the kitchen. Aunt Susanna is already awake, standing by the large stove and making omelets expertly on its surface, and Sato is sitting at the kitchen table, skimming through a PADD absentmindedly. “Mornin', Jimmy,” Susanna says, voice drawling in the way it only ever does when she's overtired and determined not to let that stop her. Jim shuffles over to give her a hug and a quick greeting, and then seats himself across from Sato at the table. His polite greeting comes out in only slightly flawed Mandarin Chinese, and he can see the corner of Sato's lips quirk upwards even though her eyes don't leave the PADD.

“Orion,” Sato announces casually, speaking in the language she's named. Jim frowns slightly—Orion is one of the languages he's least practiced at—and repeats his greeting in Orion, taking Sato's challenge for the day. It says something, either about Aunt Susanna or he and Sato, that Susanna doesn't even comment on this beyond asking what Jim wants in his omelet.

Thing is, it's not like there's much choice. When Jim first got here, Aunt Susanna's omelets were these massive things, full of bacon and pepper slices and fresh herbs and anything and everything they had hanging around. When Susanna asks Jim now what he wants in his omelet, the only answer he can give is chives, because that's the last of the herbs that came in a month ago, and they're even down to the last of those now. Everything else is gone—has been gone for some time, for all that the adults tried very hard to keep him from noticing that. Still, Jim knows he's lucky to have eggs at all, that if his family didn't raise the chickens themselves they wouldn't even have that much. Some families are worse off, he tells himself as he smiles and tells his aunt he'd like chives, please. It's worth the false cheer to see Aunt Susanna smile in return.

Breakfast takes place just like it does any other day.

“Is your brother awake, Jimmy?”

“Can't you hear him snoring from here?”

Uncle Cole and Kimura-san wander in about five minutes into the meal, and Susanna is up and bustling again, the pan still barely cooled from the last omelet.

“Sato, how d'you say butter in Orion?”

Sato sounds out a string of syllables, once slowly and a second time at actual speed, and Jim organizes those sounds in his brain.

“Thank you. Pass the butter, then?”

“Here—and fix that 's', you nearly insulted my maternal line.”

“I did not.”

“No. But you could have.”

Jim grumbles, repeats the word again with the improved consonant, and thanks her for the butter.

A couple minutes later, Sam stumbles into the kitchen, still wearing only the pajama pants he fell asleep in and rubbing at his eyes with one hand. Jim knows it isn't fair to start on Sam before breakfast—his big brother's useless before he's eaten in the mornings, and Jim knows only a few short years remain between Sam and a truly terrifying caffeine addiction—but it's easy to smirk and say, “Good morning, sleeping beauty,” so he does it anyway.

“Shut up, princess,” Sam returns, with a voice that would've been a snap if it hadn't turned into a yawn halfway through. He ruffles Jim's hair on the way past, Jim smacks his retreating arm in retaliation, and only a thoroughly disapproving look from Sato stops it from devolving into a proper brawl.

Susanna, in her usual way, waits until after Sam has an omelet in front of him to cluck disapprovingly, “You'll be late for school if you don't eat quick, Sam.” Sam's a teenaged boy, of course, so it's a bit of a pointless warning; Sam's already dug into his breakfast like it's the last food he'll ever see, pretty much inhaling the egg rather than chewing.

It does, however, prompt Sato to raise one eyebrow, lower her PADD to the table, and spin it so that Aunt Susana can see the screen. In Standard, she informs them, “Sam won't be late, Susanna. School's canceled today.”

“Canceled!” Jim cries, just about half a second before Sam says the exact same thing. Normally the echo would amuse Jim slightly, but the fact of the matter is that a classroom is the last place any sane thirteen-and-a-half year old would want to be on a cold, rainy morning. Right now he's just a little bit too pleased to even bother making fun of Sam. “Why?”

His aunt, who has been skimming the document open on Sato's PADD, says, “Governor Kodos has called a citizen's meeting to discuss the crops. We're all required to attend.”

“Good to see someone's finally doing something about it,” Uncle Cole says, smiling faintly. “We'll go after breakfast.” There's such a note of finality to it that Jim doesn't even bother contemplating what Governor Kodos means to say. Usually he'd be piping up with ideas, equal parts ridiculous and plausible, until Sato told him to shut up. Today, though, between the joy of being freed from a day of being lectured on tedious material he's already learned, and with his Uncle's confident tone to bolster his good mood, Jim doesn't even stop to exchange a look with Sato, the kind of look they've shared since their talk about Governor Kodos whenever the man's name comes up in conversation. Instead they all finish breakfast and split apart to get ready, Jim and Sam jostling each other to get up the stairs.

“No school,” Jim says, as he's tying his shoes sitting on the edge of his bed.

Sam tugs a shirt over his head and nearly falls over changing his pajama bottoms for jeans. “Anything's better than school,” he agrees, and ruffles Jim's hair again on the way down the stairs. “Don't keep everybody waiting, Jimmy,” Sam calls back over his shoulder, which is stupid considering that Sam is the one with only one sock on and his shoes clutched in his hands. Jim just rolls his eyes and clambers downstairs after his brother.

It's half an hour's walk from their farm to the nearest town, but the rain's made the car stall out again so they don't have any other choice, really. The whole way Jim is really glad he wore his warm jacket—this chill's the kind that goes right through your skin and catches at your bones, the kind that makes you shiver for hours after even when you go back inside where it's warm. The cold makes Sam cranky, and Aunt Susanna starts looking uncomfortable as well as tired; when they start meeting with other families walking down the road, some of whom don't have the money for cars and some of whom are just having mechanical issues due to the damned weird weather Tarsus has been having for months, none of them look too cheerful either. Jim walks close to Uncle Cole and Kimura-san, listening to them quietly discuss Kodos and the crops, and tries to pretend that he's the ordinary sort of child who hasn't noticed how disquieted the adults seem. He also tries to pretend the way one of the littler kids, a boy who has to be about seven or eight at the oldest, is tagging along after him isn't making his nerves worse—because, seriously, he hasn't done anything that would make him worth staring at, he isn't that interesting.

Fifteen minutes into the walk, the clouds part overhead and heavy droplets of rain fall. One lands right on the bridge of Jim's nose, and the almost icy temperature of it makes him twitch.

His aunt looks up at the sky, expression concerned, and then says, “Jimmy, be a love and run back and grab an umbrella?” Jim stops, turns, and gives her what he thinks is an incredulous look. From the way Sam snorts, he doesn't manage it quite right. Coaxingly, she goes on, “It'll be pouring by the time the meeting's done. The farm's only fifteen minutes from here, and we'll save you a seat.” Jim, who thinks walking to town in the cold and damp is bad enough without having to double back and do it again in the rain, almost refuses. He plans to, actually, until Susanna looks at him tiredly and says, “Jimmy, please.”

“Fine,” he says. Sam's smirk makes him feel like he gave in too easily, though, so he says, “You'd better get good seats.” Even he knows it sounds petulant, and with only a little more grumbling he gives it up as a lost cause and starts back.

Jim's a full five minutes back towards the farm before he realizes the little kid trailed after him when he turned. If it hadn't been raining, he would've noticed a lot sooner, but he was a little too busy avoiding rain drops and feeling sorry for himself to pay attention to his little shadow. By the time he does turn around and realize the kid is trailing after him with dogged, and surprisingly quiet, persistence, the adults are already gone.

When the kid notices that Jim's turned around, he brightens visibly. “I'm Kevin Riley,” he informs Jim, smiling around a missing tooth and offering his hand. The kid's overly chipper, grin irritatingly bright in spite of the rain. Jim doesn't take his hand, too busy worrying over what the hell the kid's parents must be thinking right now, and that smile fades a little. “I just moved here,” the kid—Kevin, Jim amends mentally, might as well call him by his name considering the kid was so intent on Jim knowing it—says. His hand falls away. “My mom said I should try to make friends and you look cool. I've,” and Kevin actually looks away at this, seeming a little embarrassed, “never seen anybody with eyes as blue as yours before.”

Nobody can say no to the Kirk baby blues, Jim thinks, an old inside joke he and his mom used to have. He kind of wishes it wasn't true at the moment. “Damn it, Riley, don't you realize your mom probably thinks you're missing right about now?” Jim says, trying to sound properly grown up to get his point across. It's doesn't quite work, but it's good enough to make Kevin look sheepish, glancing down at his shoes.

It's raining, though, and Jim realizes that the quickest way to make sure Kevin definitely gets back is to just take him along. It'll take Jim maybe another forty or so minutes to get to the farm, grab an umbrella, and walk back to town, but at least he'll be sure Kevin gets there at the end of those forty minutes. If Jim makes the kid go now, he could get lost or distracted or something between here and town, and then Jim'll probably feel guilty as hell for letting him go alone, even before Aunt Susanna starts up with disapproval. “I'm not a babysitter,” Jim bites out, scuffing the ground with one shoe, but he's only griping, really.

“'M not a baby,” Kevin throws back, looking up at Jim with determined eyes and a slight tremble to his lips.

Jim wasn't counting on being responsible for some tag-along, but it looks like it worked out that way anyway. “C'mon,” he says, and turns back towards the farm. “It's still a long walk.”

The only good thing he can say about the kid, after five more minutes of walking with him, is that at least Kevin doesn't slow Jim down. Jim's taller by at least six inches, and his legs are longer too, but Kevin determinedly quickens his pace to keep up. Though they probably look ridiculous, one older boy walking with long strides and a younger boy nearly running to keep the pace, taking two small steps for every one of the older boy's, Jim's too irritated by the rain and Kevin's presence to even think of slowing down and making it easier on the kid.

Even if he had been in a generous mood, everything else Kevin did would pretty much stop that generosity right away. It's just a fifteen minute walk back to the farm--less, by the time Jim realizes Kevin is there--but it feels twice as long because Kevin simply doesn't stop talking. He's like this puppy one of the farm hands' kids has, bouncing around everywhere and never quiet. When he isn't asking Jim his name—which he does almost every second word, and Jim doesn't answer each time, first because he genuinely didn't hear the kid and later because Kevin is bothering him way too much for pleasantries—he's babbling on about the farm's he moved to, about his mother, about how he's gonna be an older brother in a few months. Kevin is almost painfully cheerful, when all Jim wants to be is sulky about the wet and the fact that he was elected to make the walk back at all. Somehow, even the fact that Jim's almost perfectly silent doesn't keep the kid from chattering right on, as if he meant all his questions to go unanswered anyway and Jim's obliging him by being so quiet.

When they finally see the farmhouse up ahead, Jim could almost cry out in relief. “It's right there,” he tells Kevin, the first thing he's said to the younger boy since he gave him permission to tag along. Kevin blinks with surprise at being spoken to and shuts up for a second, and Jim's mood lifts immensely. Jim quickens his stride even more, and Kevin has to jog properly to keep up, but that's alright because the only thing Jim is thinking of is the warmth of home and the dry comfort of an umbrella, even if he has to share the umbrella with Kevin on the way back to town.

Jim's so distracted that it takes him nearly until the front steps of the house's porch to realize that something isn't right. He isn't sure, later, just how he knows, but a few steps away from ascending his own front steps he pauses anyway, suddenly sure that something's out of place. Jim throws out an arm, making Kevin stop just behind him, and shushes the kid when he starts to ask why they've stopped.

“What's the matter?” Kevin asks in an exaggerated whisper, as if that was what Jim had meant when he hushed the younger boy.

Jim rolls his eyes and says, as lowly as he can manage, “Kevin, quiet, there's something—”

This is when a light goes on in the upstairs room, in the attic that's served as Jim and Sam's bedroom for over a year. Jim bristles with the understanding that there's someone in the house, someone who has no permission to be there, and is thinking about rushing in to confront them when he notices that the front door has been forced in, that whoever is in the house entered not by picking the locks but by taking the door off its hinges entirely. That means somebody strong, Jim knows, probably much stronger than him. When he hears the heavy clunk of footsteps, the specific pattern of sounds that means somebody must be walking down the stairs from his room to the main floor, Jim makes a decision. Spinning around, he catches Kevin by the arm and runs, half dragging the kid behind him until the younger boy manages to get his feet under him and runs too, keeping pace with Jim as ever.

They stop when they're still close enough to keep the house in view, but far enough away that they've got a decent chance of going undetected. Jim picks a patch of brush and steps into it carefully, trying not to make it look as though it's been disturbed, before crouching down and turning his attention back to the house. As if his actions over the last minute haven't endeared him to Jim enough, Kevin seems to realize that this is his cue to do the same; he even does it quietly.

Jim isn't sure of how long they wait there. It feels like they wait forever, but Jim's smart enough to know that that's probably because it's damp, and rain keeps hitting Jim's forehead and nose, and the bush he's hiding in keeps poking him in the back. Discomfort makes it feel like they stay ducked down behind the bushes forever, listening to people rattle around in Jim's house and unable to do anything about it.

“Who d'you think is in there?” Kevin asks, after they've been waiting a while. He says it softly, and waits for an answer, so Jim decides it deserves an answer.

“I don't know,” he says, honestly. Then, raising a finger, he points to the room most of the lights and movement seem to be concentrated in, and says, “But that's the kitchen, so I know why they're there.” Kevin doesn't follow, if the look on his face is anything to go by, so Jim informs him, “They're probably stealing our food. Everybody's in the town for Governor Kodos' meeting, so somebody decided now was a good time to raid the food stores people have been keeping around.”

“We need that food,” Kevin says, catching on.

Jim shrugs. “That's why we're waiting here. We can't stop 'em, but if we stick around we'll know who took everything. They probably won't stop here, either, so when the adults come back we'll tell them who it was, and they can all go get the food back.”

There's something a little uncomfortable in how, well, awed Kevin looks when he says, “You figured all that out?” Jim ducks into himself a little, hoping he isn't blushing, because he's really not that smart. He's determined, maybe, and he picks things up quickly, but he definitely hasn't done anything to deserve that sort of look.

“It's no big deal,” Jim tells Kevin, because it isn't. “Now be quiet.”

It's another ten or fifteen minutes before the people in the house finally make their way back out. Without any way of keeping time, Jim's forced to estimate based on the stiffness in his muscles. They cramp after maybe eight of those minutes, but Jim manages to keep still mostly by ignoring the hell out of them. Kevin gives up and shifts around a little, but he stops trying to rise out of his crouch when Jim glares him down. When Jim's starting to feel the need to shift his weight pretty strongly himself, the front door finally swings back open.

What bothers Jim most at first is that the thieves aren't even bothering to be discreet about it. Admittedly all or most of the adults on the colony are off at Kodos' meeting, but there's still a certain level of subtlety Jim expects from people trying to get away with robbery. When the thieves leave his house, they don't even bother to turn the lights off, and just step out onto Aunt Susana's porch carrying bags full of whatever food they can find; they don't even bother looking around first. Something about that makes something twist in Jim's gut, a little gnawing knot of tension like the kind he usually gets before he says something that makes Sato look thoughtful. Jim can't tell why they're being so obvious—aren't they expecting the adults to come back?—or why he's feeling so nervous, even. He can feel an idea start to form in the back of his mind, a dark sort of suggestion that makes him tense in anticipation, even before he's really got it figured out.

Then Kevin says, in a hushed voice, “Can you see who they are?” and just like that the thought is gone.

“Quiet!” Jim hisses back, knowing he sounds too indignant to be responding to just that one question, but, damn it, he's almost sure that was gonna be important. He can hear Kevin tense up behind him, given that it makes the wet leaves of the bushes rattle softly, and he sighs. “Sorry,” he says, and squints out into the rain. “I'm looking.”

There are three men, as far as Jim can tell—the rain's coming down even harder now, which makes it a little hard for Jim to see them clearly. They haven't stepped off the porch or even moved much since Jim first saw them; Jim can't hear over the sound of the rain, either, but if he had to go off of blurry body language, he'd say they were having an argument. The canvas bags slung over their shoulders are pretty full, more than they would be if they'd just stolen from this house, because Jim knows for a fact they haven't had that much food in a while now. “They've gone to other places too,” Jim whispers back to Kevin. “I can't tell how many, but that's a lot of food they've stolen.”

Jim realizes he's angry a moment later, angry in a way that fear and cold can't block out any longer. Everyone needs food now, Jim knows that. Maybe he and his family were a little better off than most people, but it wasn't by much. The crops are failing everywhere, and everyone is equally caught a few months away from starvation; there's no single person or family who needs that food more than any other. Jim's angry because there are at least three people willing to let others starve so they can stop being hungry—and he knew that, he knew people weren't good, but that was back on Earth where he was expecting it, and this is on Tarsus, where all he's known is kindness. His anger compounds itself because it's like the robbers aren't even trying to hide it, like they don't care that anyone would know the place had been robbed as soon as they came back. Jim is picturing Aunt Susana's face when she finds out the food is gone, and the tense lines of Sato's frown, and the fact that his brother, who eats like he's starving all the time anyway, now might actually have to. It isn't like they're not coming back—

“Wait,” Jim says, very quietly. The sinking feeling is back in his gut, colder and tighter than it was before, and he feels frozen from more than rain.

The thieves choose that moment to step away from the shadow of the porch, and onto the rain-soaked stairs that lead down to the pavement, allowing Jim to see them properly for the first time. Jim feels himself go so tense that Kevin makes a questioning noise beside him, feels his fingernails bite crescents into the skin of his palms as his hands curl into fists. Of course Kevin wouldn't understand, Jim thinks, since he's only been on planet for a little while. Jim, though, sees the dark cut shirts the men wear and recognizes the white insignia on their shoulders even through the rain.

With bags of food slung over their shoulders, the men who wear the uniforms of Kodos' militia turn and walk towards the next farm.

Kodos. Kodos' meeting, Jim thinks, watching their retreating backs and feeling part of himself go numb. “Shit,” he says aloud, and scrambles to his feet, almost clawing Kevin as he drags him up too. He can't think about it, what this means, but he knows—

“What?” Kevin asks, his voice scared as Jim pushes him towards the road. “What is it? Who are they?”

But Jim can't think about it, he can't.

He pushes Kevin onto the road, turns them towards town, and says, “Run.”

…

The things Jim does not think about:

His feet ache. His legs are cramped from crouching. He doesn't think he smiled at Aunt Susanna this morning. The rain is still falling, damn it, and he's soaked and tired. He never did get that umbrella. Kevin is panting beside him, looking like he would ask for a break, except he keeps looking up at Jim and shutting his mouth, so Jim can't even imagine what he looks like. They keep passing empty farms, with the lights left on and the doors wide open. He never finished having Sato correct his pronunciation in Orion, and if he leaves that skill like it is now he'll probably insult somebody in a bar one day by accident and get himself killed, so Sato really needs to be okay. The road is empty. It feels like he and Kevin are maybe the only people still breathing in the entire world. It's a long walk to town, and even though they're running Jim knows it won't be fast enough, that they might not get there soon enough. He's sorry he didn't pay more attention to Kimura-san now, because obviously Sam saw something in him, so maybe he was worth talking to after all? They aren't running fast enough. Jim's already inserting past tense in his mind—Sato was the best teacher he'd ever had, Aunt Susanna was kind of a better mother than his own, Sam wasn't done growing and he wonders what his brother would have looked like—oh god, Sam.

“C'mon!” Jim snaps, feeling his voice try to crack on the word and forcing down the knot in his throat, because they're still going to be in time, they are.

Jim tries not to think at all, after that.

…

Jim actually almost gets lost, once he gets into town, just trying to find the meeting hall. He didn't know how blind he was running until then, as though he'd blocked out the world with blinders somewhere between the farmhouse and here, until his feet carry him around a corner he doesn't mean to turn on. It's only Kevin's wary pant of, “I thought it was...,” that makes him skid to a stop, following Kevin's pointed finger.

“Jesus,” he says, involuntarily. He's lucky the road was pretty straight, in hindsight, or who knows where he would have wound up. “Yeah, yeah, you're right,” he gets out, and he and Kevin start moving again, feet slapping loudly against pavement.

Kevin's more than picked up on his urgency by then. Jim's thirteen-and-a-half, with long legs for his height—Kevin's been having to take two strides for every one of Jim's, but somehow he's keeping up.

There's nobody on the streets, which is lucky, because Jim would pretty much bowl over anybody who got in his way right now. Still, Jim gets enough evidence to see that the town's not empty. Shutters snick closed just as they run past, and locks click closed on doors. Jim's caught between wanting to scream—why aren't you helping why are you shutting us out are they hurt god did anyone hurt them?—and wanting to take that as a hopeful sign. Maybe, if there are still people here, he's just being paranoid. If there was some sort of danger, people wouldn't be indoors, they'd be out there helping. Kodos doesn't have that large of a militia. If there was danger, these people could outnumber them, fight them off. They wouldn't let their neighbors get hurt or—Jim can't think about that—or anything. Maybe Jim's just too imaginative, like Sato says he is sometimes.

Except the sight of Kodos' militia stealing from his home is burned into his mind, and he can't quite believe it. Until the moment he goes hurtling into the meeting hall and sees them all alive and well, sees Sato looking caught between amusement and displeasure and Sam laughing at him for looking like an idiot, he won't be able to believe it. He runs.

The meeting hall is on the far side of town, past the residential area and just before the complex that the Governor and his staff are housed in. On most days, the doors are open—it's a community building, which hosts everything from the town's knitting circle to weekly prayer, not that Jim ever attends either of those. Today the door is shut.

“No,” Jim says, though he isn't sure what he's denying. “Help me open it.” There's no guard—there would be a guard if something was wrong, wouldn't there—so Jim and Kevin pull the heavy door open on their own, with Jim doing most of the work. He feels the edge of the wood snag at his fingertips, and then the door is open.

He's not—he can't—there's something rising in his throat and he wishes for a second that he would throw up because then he could look away, he could be sick like if he was back at the farmhouse and Aunt Susana was going to bring a cool towel up the stairs to make him feel better. He doesn't think he's ever going to feel better. Jim thinks he's hallucinating and knows he isn't, feels the smell stick in the back of his throat, sickly sweet and coppery, and this is real, this is real and he can't—

“Oh, fuck,” he hears himself say, but not in his own voice, in a voice that's low and shattered all over the place, in a voice that hangs just behind the edge of a scream. “Kevin, don't look, don't.”

Kevin whimpers, once, behind him, and they both look. It's not the sort of thing they can look away from.

Jim's pretty sure he's not in control of his legs when they take him forward, because he just wants to get away, he wants to not be here, he wants this to never have happened, he wants to wake up and take the morning over again and make something change, but he steps forward anyway. He steps into the meeting house and tries to ignore the way his shoes squelch against the wet ground. “It's just rain,” he hears himself say aloud, with something like a hysterical giggle following the words. He hiccups a second later, and he's lying, he's lying so much, he's knows what he's walking on and it's not rain. “Kevin, stay out there,” he says. He looks back, and Kevin is white and shaking behind him, Kevin is following after him, but the kid looks like he's a ghost himself, like he's about to go translucent around the edges if he gets any paler. “Tell me if a guard comes,” he says, as though he cares.

He's angry for a minute, so, so angry, he's going to fucking kill them all and Kodos is going to die, and then he's just cold again, and Kevin is a kid. “Wait outside,” he says, and Kevin goes.

Jim feels like he's walking through a dream. There are chairs set up all over the long hall, and they look as though they used to be set in rows, but some of them are pushed aside, toward the door he's walking in from. He can picture—there must have been a stampede, when they realized what was happening. Some of the—of the people—he can't call them corpses they're just lying down a while—don't even look like the bullets hit them, but like they were—anyway, there was probably a stampede. A lot of them are pressed against the back walls, so they must have shut the doors, Kodos' guards must have shut the doors in the middle of the meeting, and probably no one even noticed at first, but then when it was too late they tried to run, and the doors—Jim knows the doors are heavy.

He walks to the front of the meeting hall and sees where Kodos and the guards must have been standing. He knows because there's a circle of clean ground, there.

There is an abandoned PADD on the ground, in that clean circle. He picks it up, because he would rather look at that than anything else. There's a document open on it, and Jim skims it automatically for a few seconds before he realizes it's a speech. It takes him another moment to realize that this was what Kodos read, as he stood before the crowd gathered in this hall, that these are the last words—that this is Kodos' justification. He can't put it down, after that.

The beginning of the speech is pretty much what Jim expected when he heard the meeting was called—it discusses the food shortage of late, the failure of the crops. It's then, reading the cold statistics, that Jim realizes the adults had been managing to keep some of the severity of the matter away from him, after all. The famine Jim expected to be a few short months off was looking to be nearer to a few weeks, and a larger percentage of the crops had failed than he'd known. Starfleet is not as close as his Aunt had suggested, and the extra food supply not so large.

When Kodos' speech starts to talk about doing right for the community, and making important and difficult decisions for the good of the whole, something in Jim breaks in understanding, but it's not something he's willing to process, so he keeps reading. Kodos speaks for a long while about genetics, about fitness for survival. There are people too old, too infirm to be expected to survive the upcoming crisis, Kodos says through text. There are people with family histories of disease, of mental instability, of crime. There are people who have clashed with the police before, who have struggled with alcoholism, who have spoken against the government. Some of these people, Kodos explains, cannot be expected to survive. The rest cannot be trusted to maintain the peace.

Half the population, the PADD reads, will be able to survive on the food presently available within this colony, provided it is carefully rationed over the upcoming months. If we attempt to maintain the existing population, not even that half will survive. We must conserve those we can—those who are most able to survive.

Kodos does not say, those most worthy to survive, but Jim hears it anyway.

What follows is a list. Jim sees, and is not surprised to see, that it is a list full of names. He cannot even count them; he does not have the energy to try. He scrolls past them, each name present in neat black font upon the screen, and feels every name like a needle pressing through his skin. They were friends and neighbors and living strangers, all the people sitting in the meeting hall today, and now they are gone.

He finds the names he is looking for, about a minute in. He closes his eyes, trying to erase them from his mind, but the list on the PADD has been burned into his mind, and he sees it against his eyelids when he shuts them.

Susanna Rose Croswell

Cole Aaron Croswell

Hoshi Sato

George Samuel Kirk

Jim opens his eyes again, and scrolls to the end of the speech. He almost hears it, in Kodos' voice: Your sacrifice will not be forgotten by those who, because of it, can live.

His name is on the list too, Jim knows. Just above Sam's is James Tiberius Kirk in the same block print. There is no reason given for it—there is no reason given for anyone. He knows he and Sam were selected because they had a history, because Jim had driven a car off a cliff and Sam had had the police called on him by Frank one time when he ran away too well, but none of that is present in the text. He wonders what Sato ever did to wind up here, just another name on Kodos' list. He wonders what Uncle Cole did, or Aunt Susanna.

“Jesus,” he thinks, and says, his voice echoing loud and hollow against the wall of the meeting house. “They saved my life with an umbrella.”

Jim doesn't realize he's crying until the walls blur.

…

It doesn't take Jim long to realize that his name is on the list, and that he is not dead.

It's not such a huge revelation, probably, but Jim knows distantly that he's way past shock and would be amazed, if he could spare energy for amazement, that he's thinking rationally at all.

The fact is, though, that he is standing in what was a meeting hall, not far from the Governor's housing complex, and that he was supposed to be dead in this hall. Kodos' militia, his enforcers who are supposed to be police and now are simply paid murderers, are housed in that complex as well. Jim is supposed to be dead, and they are supposed to have killed him, and he and Kevin were not exactly subtle on their way here. If the guards find them, they really will be dead.

For a second, Jim can't make himself care. He hasn't looked—not for Uncle Cole, or Aunt Susana, or even for Sato or Sam—because he knows he will lose his mind entirely if he sees them now, and he can't. He's seen their names on the list, though. He knows they were coming here, and he knows that Sato would never be late to anything, that Aunt Susana would never slip out early. They were here, and now they're gone. Jim thinks, for the smallest fraction of a second, what if?, the same lingering whisper of thought that caught at him just before the car plummeted over the cliff and nearly took him with it. Maybe, he thinks for just a moment, it wouldn't be so terrible if the guards found him.

Then he remembers Kevin, and remembers the same urge that made him leap from the car at the last possible second. He turns around, clutching the PADD tight, and walks.

Jim doesn't let himself think until he's outside. His shoes are wet, still, but when he steps outside it's easier to pretend it's from the rain. He almost can't believe he hated the rain before. He's still just as cold and wet, and now he's shivering as well, but he lets himself think that the rain will wash this away somehow, wash away the memory of it and maybe even wash away this entire day to let him start fresh. It's not true. Jim's thirteen-and-a-half; he knows that. But he lets himself believe it for a while anyway.

Kevin is tucked in against the side of the building, crouched down with his knees pressed hard against his chest and his arms wrapped tight around them. The kid's shaking—sobbing loud enough for Jim to hear him over the rain, actually. Jim makes out one word that sounds like Mama, and feels himself go even more numb. He's not feeling pain, right now, or sorrow. He just feels empty, and cold, like he won't be able to process this until it comes back as nightmares later. Kevin, though, obviously doesn't feel that way.

“Kevin,” Jim says, his voice hoarse. Kevin looks up at him with red eyes, water streaking down from the corners of his eyes and the dripping ends of his dark hair. “C'mon, kid. We've gotta go.” Kevin just shakes his head, and tucks it back down.

“'M not a baby,” Kevin says, voice muffled and raw, “and you aren't my babysitter, remember? And my—my m-mom always says not to go anywhere with strangers.”

It's a defense, Jim recognizes distantly. Jim's gone numb, and Kevin's hiding behind his mother's rules so that he can pretend she's not—gone. “My name's James Tiberius Kirk,” Jim hears himself say. Kevin looks up at that, confused, and Jim's a little surprised to; he's answering a question Kevin hasn't been asking in a long while. It feels good, though, too, like he's taking his name back from Kodos. Kodos made him just that, a name on a list, for a little while. Jim tells Kevin his name and it feels like he's a person again, more than letters of black text. “There,” Jim says, trying to find something like a smile and failing. “Now we're not strangers.”

The rain keeps falling, the sound of it striking the ground the only one that Jim hears for a long while.

Then Kevin says, slow and confused, like he's hearing maybe one word out of four, “Ti?” He looks up as he says it, meeting Jim's eyes once again.

“Close enough,” Jim says, and offers his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> As I warned at the top of this piece, this story deals with very sensitive subject matter. As such, I really hope that anyone who feels I handled it indelicately or in some way caused offense will tell me as much; I really am trying to be careful with this story.
> 
> Writing this story is slow going, largely because of the aforementioned care going into it. I'll post the next chapters as soon as I have them written.


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